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From: Hardy M. Cook <
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Date: Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Subject: Updated WordCruncher

After using PCs since the early 1980s, I switched to Macs several years ago. I was able to find Mac programs for almost every PC application I had used as my excuse for not switching. Well, there were a few for which no clear replacement was evident, so I have a virtual machine on a separate 27” monitor to run those programs. Among them are Elaine and John Thiesmeyer’s Editor program from Serenity Software, Quicken for Windows, and TurboTax. (I know about Quicken for Mac and I will share my opinion of it privately to anyone who asks. Hint, it rhymes with mucks.)

However, because I was now using a 64-bit machine, I could no longer run some of the old 32-bit Widows programs I was still attached to. These programs included TACT and the Chadwyck-Healey The Bible in English and the Chadwyck-Healey Editions and Adaptations of Shakespeare, both of which I could still use in LION, but I missed as standalone programs.

However, the program I missed the most and that I had used since my early days of computing was WordCruncher with The Riverside Shakespeare. Other concordances are available online, but I found WordCruncher with the Riverside particularly useful when I was annotating text for notes in an edition.

As I returned to annotating Lucrece the other day, I was reminded of how much I missed the WordCruncher/Riverside combination that I discussed in my 1990 paper “A Shakespearean in the Electronic Study,” a paper presented to the computing approaches seminar of the 1990 SAA conference in Philadelphia: http://shaksper.net/documents/doc_download/53-electronic-study.

On whim, I thought I might check and see if an updated 64-bit WordCrucher existed and to my amazement I found it at its original site of creation—Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah:

This updated WordCruncher comes in both a Windows 32-bit and 64-bit version with a free copy of The Riverside Shakespeare; a few other applications can be downloaded. I forget how much I initially paid for WordCruncher and the Riverside, but the cost was not nominal and certainly not free.

Perhaps the time of WordCruncher as a text analysis tool has passed, but I am enormously pleased to have my old friend back.

Hardy M. Cook

Professor Emeritus

Bowie State University

Editor of SHAKSPER <shaksper.net>

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